Cookie Notice

WE LOVE THE NATIONS OF EUROPE

However, this blog is a US service and this site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse.

Wednesday, 9 January 2019

Designer primrose vests and obscene imprecations

There is a new suggestion going the rounds from the Remainers - that they should stage a Remainer 'General Strike' in the event of Brexit happening. The chaos, of course, would be appalling.

Schools and universities would be short-staffed as teachers would leave their posts to enjoy a strike day, some in London no doubt headed to Borough Market for a day of browsing and grazing. But Borough Market, like much of Hoxton and Spitalfields, would have come to a halt. The artisanal yoghurt-makers would be striking, as would the sour-dough bakers and vegan-rennet Islington cheese-makers. The Feng Shui carrot stall would be deserted, the hipster porridge and Quinoa bars empty and dark, and the cute bistrot start-up using roofer's nailbags as plates forlorn.

In Farringdon, Exeter Market would be empty. The app design studios, the organic health workshop in which Guardian hacks have their feet nibbled by fish to the sounds of whalesong, the myriad colour consultancies and the interior design practices they serve all dark. Only St John, the coarse eaterie feeding ruddy Leavers with offal, would remain open.

Across London traffic would flow freely as TfL's traffic consultants took a strike day. Black cabs would enjoy a near monopoly - Remainers preferring Uber - with drivers explaining the perils of Qualified Majority Voting to imprisoned fares. The trains would be blissfully empty, and best of all the streets clear and safe from the swarms of lycra louts on their £3k death machines.

The BBC would broadcast Ealing comedies and 1950s war films non-stop as eight out of ten staff would not have turned up. James O'Brien (Ampleforth, LSE) would be lunching with David Dimbleby (Charterhouse, Oxford, Bullingdon Club) and Adam Boulton (Westminster, Christ Church, Oxford) at Le Gavroche whilst assistants covered their shows.

And outside Parliament, a score of Remainers in plastic vests specially designed in pastel and primrose shades by Stella McCartney would howl vile and obscene imprecations at SPADs and researchers they mistook for MPs.

55 comments:

That sums up Greater London with an alarming degree of accuracy. An area of Britain totally isolated from the rest of Britain with privileges that the rest of the (real) country get rightly angry about.

If anyone reading this watched "Brexit - an uncivil war" you will have noticed the point in the remainer focus group meeting where the woman from the north stood up and got visibly angry with the southerners and the remain leader suddenly saw the light - "this hasn't just started; it started 20 years ago". We have always lived in a divided country its just that those divisions are laid bare now. Sadly, I don't think this situation is fixable because those with the vested interests will have no interest at all in ceding any wealth or power to the provinces. And that is a "cross-party" statement.

I cannot see the BBC broadcasting war films, but apart from that you are correct. Ed Balls is beginning to look much brighter than his wife, having been chucked out of parliament he is now free loading elsewhere while the charming Yvette causes trouble in parliament.

At the risk of causing a riot the preponderance of incompetent and undemocratic women at large in politics appears to have damaged the idea that they are superior beings, who if left to run the FTSE 100 and the country would produce a land flowing with milk and honey. Every cloud etc etc.

Youth are on your side? Like Hell. You had to big up your bogus march 3x --you had far less than the numbers who turned out FOR foxhunting. And very few of your marchers were young. Middle aged, comfortably off and selfish leftists most of them were.

Go ahead with your strike middle-class--we need the laughs.

Meanwhile in the real world remainiac scum Bercow is trying to put forward a remainiac bill to force a rolling vote on May's treason every three days. If you want civil unrest Anon--let you and your remainiac mates keep on as you are.

One of the most disturbing things to have happened in British society over the last generation has been theSoviet-style takeover of our public services for political purposes.We all know where we are going when public bodies working to a Common Purpose seek to go against the wishesof the electorate.

As for science - well science's credibility went out the window with the hockey stick graph and climategate.

9 January 2019 at 10:25

"The economy cannot survive on tarmaccing drives, and on bodging roofs alone."

Your comment says more about you than it does the working people of this country.

Apologies for repeated commenting, but the visiting trolls - having been stung by the truth in Raedwald's post - are puttingin a fine show.

@Anonymous - 9 January 2019 at 11:07

"populism" - how about Democracy; how about Hope; how about Vision; how about Future?

There is a whole tier of people in the UK at present who will never leave the streets on which they are born; blame them if you willfor their own self-imposed hopelessness - but I would like to give them a chance.

The UK once had a population that were decently educated and trained, and the very side of politics that claims to achieve those thingsare the people who are holding them back. I find it incredible that the people who prattle on about austerity are the people who line up alongside the corporates and bankers to perpetuate the EU abomination.

I would hate to know that you vote for a Labour Party that supports the EU corporate machine.

So, since no one can demonstrate that British values are fundamentally different from those of any other EU country, what is the problem, in making laws together, to enable the efficient operation of a single market, and to prevent races to the bottom on environmental matters, H&S, but on little else, then?

"Freedom" is a pretty commonly claimed value. Anything that is not strictly forbidden is allowed vs anything that is not specifically allowed is forbidden leads to two very different versions of freedom don't you think?

What "value" should any society aspire to beyond the freedom of the individual? There clearly need to be constraints, but these should be kept to the minimum practical.

Under a Napoleonic code you go about your life and business in effect with the states permission.

As AJP Taylor observed. Before 1914 in this country you could go through life and, apart from the copper on the beat and the post office, hardly know the state existed. Was that true of continental Europe?

And yes, there were many things in pre 1914 Britain that were not particularly pleasant but I'm not sure that state was one of them.

Well, I speak three Continental languages, and I've spent a great deal of time among the fine people of the relevant countries

It's plain as day to me after all that, that their values are *identical* to those of decent British people.

And you wonder why you are mocked and viewed with contempt in equal measure by millions? Nay, hundreds of millions, around the civilised world?

Oh, there is a British value which differs from all twenty-seven other EU countries. This one believes that its people should not enjoy the rights, freedoms and protections, which would stem from a proper, that is, written, constitution.

We've done very well for about a thousand years without a written constitution.

Germany? Didn't exist before 1870. Current form 1946France? What are we up to? 5th Republic? 6th Republic? Anyway, from 1958. Italy? Didn't exist before 1871. Current form 1947

And so on.

And in England, serfdom was effectively ended by the 14th century. In most of Europe, not until the mid-19th century. In some Euro nations, serfdom went well into the 20th century.

Believe me, without a constitution the British people have enjoyed greater rights, freedoms and protections for far far longer than anywhere else in Europe. Your statements are specious, risible, uninformed and ignorant nonsense. Not that I'm surprised. It's really not your fault.

You may know that the UK has 5 universities in the world's top 20. The rest of the EU? All 27 nations with a population of 430m? Not one. Not a single university in the global top 20.

Look, we love Europe - every Englishman adores rural France, loves Italy, is fond of the silly Germans, respects art and architecture from Athens to Seville. But the EU is dragging you down, condemning you to a serfdom from which you've all but recently escaped. Don't let them do it.

Actually the Basic Law which governs ganz DE was in 1949 - but yes, extended to the Ossis in 1990.

Etu - Why would something Nigel Farage say concern me? I'm sure there are many opinions, but yet again you're living in a make-believe world. Or actually, an EU world in which actual real democracy, as in the UK 2016 referendum, can be over-ridden by pettifogging legal technicalities, clever lawyer's tricks and manipulation by anti-democratic unelected officials.

Yes, had we given up our democratic freedom as you suggest we would continue to be imprisoned in the EU with no way of escape.

As it is, we're leaving on 29th March at 11pm. Our last day in servitude.

If the largely effete elie wenyt on strile ti wont matter. It ibnt matter if doctors and nurses whent on strike. But if the working class, ie who work the trains, buses and above all the power generation and distribution, strike, it will wite literally be lights and everything else OUT. No planes, no transport, no phones, no hospitals, no nothing. Engineers are by and large conservatives.

continental legal system is better-MarkI know very little about the 'legal system' beyond German criminal law (and there my little knowledge is badly out of date) but the main advantage to many European criminal justice systems is that they have no juries, no 'whimsical darlings plucked at random off the broadway'. They are an 'interrogative' system not 'adversarial', the object of the court is, primarily to establish the facts and then guilt or otherwise. Or as my lawyer said to me "the DA isn't your enemy, neither are the 3 judges nor the two professional jurers, your only enemy in the courtroom is the lawyer who is safeguarding the "victim's interests."

And you wonder why you are mocked and viewed with contempt in equal measure by millions? Nay, hundreds of millions, around the civilised world?

You have just outed yourself as a liar - not that it was difficult to tell with all the other crap you've been spouting. I also speak fluently more than one other 'continental' language and can get by in three others; I have also been a resident of - and lived long term in - three other countries (three different continents) I have traveled and worked in about 60 countries (all continents) and not in a single one does your sentence quoted above ring true. In fact I'd say the exact opposite is true: Great Britain may not be universally loved - and nobody could claim we were saints or the Empire was a force for pure good - but no-one, NO-ONE, in all my life has viewed us with contempt and the only mocking is the same general rib-pocking mocking we make of others.